Lily in Love
Playing for Keeps
Játszani kell

Maggie Smith and Christopher Plummer are a theatrical power couple in this Hungarian/American adaptation of Ferenc Molnár's stage play Testőr. Smith plays a brilliant playwright/screenwriter who is desperate not to cast her supercilious aging matinee idol husband (Plummer) in her latest film about a middle-aged woman who has an affair with a dashing Italian. The arrogant, fame-hungry husband conspires with his agent (Adolph Green), who is also producing the film, to transform himself into a dashing Italian actor in order to land the part. But when his wife starts to fall for his alter ego, the pompous thespian becomes insanely jealous.

An '80s romantic comedy of deception and mistaken identity set in the world of theater and filmmaking should be a slam dunk, especially when it stars Christopher Plummer as a ham actor constantly quoting Christopher Marlowe at the top of his lungs. But this listless picture never manages to get laughs or convince us that its internal logic makes any sense at all. Worse, in order for the film to work, we must not only believe that Plummer's character is able to pull off a Tootsie-like transformation that will fool even those closest to him, but that the brief encounter movie Smith's character has written has a great script with a wonderful leading man role an actor would go to great lengths to play. Neither is the case.

This is the third American film adaptation of the Hungarian play, after the pre-Code comedy The Guardsman (1931) and musical The Chocolate Soldier (1941). Maggie Smith starred in a 1977 Toronto stage revival of the musical adaptation, and her smash success in that production led to this picture getting made by Hungarian writer/director Károly Makk (I've never seen any of his films, but five of them were nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes). But her performance in this version is decidedly bland and really could have benefitted from a bit of the spice Dame Maggie was so well known for. Alas, she reserved that for her latter-day comments about this picture, which she called "the goulash" because she could barely understand a word of her Hungarian director's direction. She also, on more than one occasion, referred to her co-star "Christopher Bummer"—so cheeky!